Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker review – death becomes them

The swirl of reviews and is up, opinions swooping and swarming, crashing into each other, firing their laser vigour out into the deepest galaxy of internet space; many keen to shout “It’s shit!” as loudly as possible, others to go “It’s fine, I don’t know what they’re on about,” none yet that I’ve seen to say, “Really great, necessary addition to the canon.” I don't know why I feel obliged to add my tuppence; I wouldn't really call it a review as much as to say I guess I've got observations and you, you lucky reader, are good to get em. Merry Christmas!

Put it this way: I might watch it again, but not so much for pleasure as to see whether my opinions hold over a second viewing. And I won’t be doing that for at least, oh I don’t know, maybe 40 years. No, maybe I will, but probably not, because the chief impression I had watching this was that they have sucked the franchise dry, sucked it completely dry, reanimated the corpse through some incredible film-making sorcery, and then sucked the whole fucking thing dry again.

I mean, Emperor Palpatine. Are you having a fucking laugh?

So yeah, the storyline was fucked. I mean how much emotion are you supposed to invest in the question of whether the heroes will kill the dude that was already fucking killed three films ago. Now, he’s being kept in a state of seemingly undead, on some sort of afterlife support system and it turns out he’s been propelling the bad guy (who’s not really a bad dude, just a bit upset) using his ability to psychically talk to anyone in the universe and see what’s going on, sort of like God then, and more than that, while in hiding he’s conjured, apparently out of his undead arsehole, a gigantic fleet of about a kajillion star destroyers that all zap planets like Death Stars. Like get the fuck out of here.

Meanwhile, we’re supposed to be worrying about whether our young, considerably-more-posh-than-I-remember hero Rey is going to be able to resist the entreaties of the bad dude and the undead bad dude who happens to be her grandad to become a superfucking real bad girl and let her friends die and all this jazz, storywise it fucking stinks no two ways about it.

(Seeing her as much posher all of a sudden might be something to do with a newspaper article I read about Daisy Ridley showing she understood fuck all about her class privileges, but it also might be the film-makers up-poshing her for her royal reveal, because it turns out that in 2018, they produced a book championing Rey as evidence that anybody could make it, no matter how humble their origins, in the Star Wars universe; only now it turns out, as before, that the whole thing is basically a spat among princes.)

Furthermore seeing as the bad dude is basically a god, and the story hinges entirely on whether Rey defeats him or not, why do all these other people have to die? The other films (not the prequels which don't count) seemed to find a better balance between the interfamilial drama plotline and the swarming armies of imperial and rebel fleets. This had just as much laser blasting, but it was never clear why any of it had to happen, seeing as Rey wanted to get to the emperor and he wanted her to come.

My feeling is that previously the story might have been hookum but the charm carried it over, but the charm has been clinically and expertly sucked the fuck out. They played around well in Eps 7 and 8 between the new characters and the old, especially keeping Luke back and seeing Han get appendectomied into the next life, plus there was just a huge sense of relief that someone who really loved the originals was in charge after the aforementioned unmentionable prequels, but here it’s just all too much, the nostalgia has worn off and seeing Luke’s family home, for example, or the Emperor’s Death Star throne room, or Billy Dee Williams, it’s like yeah we get it, past references, no one cares any more; and then you’re just left with a storyline that doesn’t engage you.

In place of an engaging story, they do a lot of heartstring tweaking. Here they have got something going on that might bear a second watch, because there were a lot of moving moments, especially to do with Carrie Fisher. I was uncomfortable about the CGI Carrie Fisher mainly because it strikes me as incredibly disrespectful that when one of your actors dies, instead of writing around it, you resurrect them and have them cavort about pretty much as if you were pushing the cadaver around the stage – and in a film where more or less the same thing has happened to literally the most evil character in the universe. I did not like it one bit, but at one point when Rey goes to leave Leia and they have a loving hug and you sense this is the last time they will meet – you kind of hope that maybe this is the last time you see Leia cos it’s so uncomfortable, but it wasn’t – and then there’s a moment when Billy Dee Williams says something along the lines of “Tell Leia how much I love her”, and you get it: they really did love Carrie Fisher and she died and they’re really fucking sad about that. I think, but maybe that's what they want us to think.

And for the first time ever, I was suddenly worried by the question: does Star Wars have a race problem? There’s been some chat about how Kelly Marie Tran had barely any lines in this episode; this after her bigger part in Last Jedi drew a load of internet grief from couchfucking types. But for me, it was something about the way they portrayed the gap yah posh white girl visiting the Indian-looking festival and getting a necklace off the friendly local that gave me the shivers; something about the way the rodent who tweaked C3PO’s brain seemed to be another jolly foreigner type. Both as if they were using aliens to get away with some pretty carefree orientalism. And then there was the way that Finn found his soulmate, another ex-stormtrooper who just happened to be played by a black girl from London, as if they were saying, don’t worry that he seems to fancy the royal big potatoes, he’s going to end up with someone suitable. I dunno, I’m no race theorist, but there was something off key going on there, even while there's progress that they did have some good roles for black people and they don’t even have to die.

The other interesting thing they seem to be getting at is that they keep saying to each other: “Stick together, if we stick together we’ll be able to beat this all-powerful enemy” and I couldn’t help imagining maybe they mean us. Maybe they mean if we stick together, remember our friends, try to work together, we can beat this fascist menace, this far-right monster growing in the black darkness, steadily getting stronger and more confident, coming on ready for its big reveal. Maybe they’re trying to indoctrinate the kids to believe that they can take this thing on. I hope that they did – and I hope that they do. That would be one good meaning of A New Hope, I suppose. But it seems just as likely that they are telling us that we the plebs can’t do anything about the fascist onslaught and have to hope a royal princess takes up the challenge.

It was a film seemingly very preoccupied with death. Lots of people died, lots of supposedly main characters as well, but for most it was time to die (plus they can all come back as fucking ghosts any time so it’s not much of a hindrance). And the truth is that for Star Wars, too, it is, I’m afraid, time to die.

Joker review – origins of specious

About half way through Joker I wondered what I would say if someone asked me what I thought of the film.

“It doesn’t matter what I think,” was what I considered my response would be.

Doesn’t bode well for a review, perhaps, but I think it stands up. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to burden you what I did think; only that, as there are as many Joker origin stories as people to invent them, nobody else’s is ever going to be on the button. The most important element of Todd Phillips’ Joker origin story is that he got it made. I haven’t got mine made; I haven’t even got one to get made, but I do have a clear idea of who the Joker is and most of us, when we are given an end point, can have a stab at getting there.

By which I suppose I mean that Joker is a kind of fan-fic; it’s hardly canon; it’s more a riff or two or three on what’s gone before. No one who comes along to reimagine the Joker or Gotham is going to feel beholden to this film, unless, I suppose, they make a sequel. Joker 2: After the Laughter, perhaps.

There’s a lot to like in Joker. Joaquin Phoenix’s dancing especially. The grit of a trash-strewn Gotham Bronx. Just the very idea of dragging the supernal Joker down into the dirt of having an origin story in the first place, especially one as scrawny and craggy as this one. The violence was satisfyingly authentic. The cinematography, the choreography, the acting were all great. Atlanta’s Paper Boi pitched up in a great scene. The plot twists were – sometimes – effective, while the fears of incel inspo and hand-wringing about Gary Glitter seem wide of the mark.

But there’s a lot not to like. It’s a very confused film. It’s confused about mental illness. It’s confused about protest movements. It’s confused about abuse victims. It’s confused about how old Joker even is (it implies he’s 30, but Phoenix is 44 and looks and acts it; in any case even if he was 30, could the Joker really be 20 years older than Batman?). It's confused about what happens when you suddenly stop taking seven different types of medication.

Its cake-and-eat-it attitude to psychosis, schizophrenia, hallucination, child abuse – that these real, actual real things that happen to actual real people can somehow be juggled in such a way as to give us a plausible origin for something as implausible as a fucking superhuman killer clown – was undignified. It had little or nothing to offer about the world as we find it today, when the killer clowns are running the fucking show. Even its take on Taxi Driver-era New York amounted to no more than saying funding cuts in mental health provision are bad. Not an awful message, but thin.

Of course it’s a comic book, so perhaps it’s too much to ask for more. But of course, it’s not a comic book at all; it’s real, real, realism, not even magic realism, and certainly not comic book. The crux of the film is that the Joker is brought down to earth, explicated in terms of what might happen to any of us; the unreal made real by the force of plot. And it fell well short of managing the lofty goal, although there was plenty of fun on the way.

And the less said about the strand with Bobby De Niro the better – in terms of script anyway, although the joke at the end was pretty good.

Visions in Meditation, Sarah Davachi, Philip Jeck, Darkstar, Union Chapel review

 

Philip Jeck

This happened in October, but I forgot to press go on this until today

It was a strange one at the Union Chapel, an odd Friday night. A screening of four films by Stan Brakhage – the programme had him as “a non-narrative film-maker, the most famous experimental film-maker of the 20^th century” – called Visions in Meditation. These were abstract footage of a journey through the US in the late 80s, filmed on 16mm, and set – with the exception of one film – to a soundtrack of silence. Interspersed between the showings was music – minimalist, experimental, electronic, ambient – commissioned specially for this show, to respond to the films. And that’s what I was there for.

All three pieces were performed by the composer seated at a desk, twiddling nobs on a synthesiser, accompanied by a string trio, two violins and a cello from the London Contemporary Orchestra. The first to go up was Sarah Davachi, a Canadian composer who specialises in “disclosing the delicate psychoacoustics of intimate aural spaces” – this means drones – and who has made some great albums that I’ve enjoyed listening to on YouTube.   

The wafting smoke, pentagram candle holders hanging from the ceiling and most especially the general ambience of grinding discondant drones gave the whole thing somewhat more of a Satanic ritual vibe than your average Friday night in Upper Street – unless you count the Slug and Lettuce, obviously. It would be harsh to call Davachi’s output “anti-music”, but being as it dispenses with rhythm, harmony and melody, it wouldn’t be unfair. In much the same way as in jazz you can play anything except the wrong notes, in this kind of music you can play anything as long as it’s not musical. But I’m a great fan, because by dispensing of all the usual techniques, you get music that is free of the manipulations, end-seeking and confinement typical of most performance*. 

This focus on means rather than ends gives ambient, experimental music a refreshing, egoless and what I am going to call “dis-rational” character. The benefit of disrationality is that by offering nothing for the ego-mind to hold on to, it points to the reality beyond experience. But of course, when we dispense with rationality, it becomes difficult to say whether things are pointing to reality or just stealing a living. It’s one thing to listen to this on YouTube, but something else to pay actual money and spend your actual Friday night doing it in public. There was definitely an emperor’s new clothes/Arts Council funding/#WhitePeopleTwitter about the whole thing; as though at any moment, someone sensible might walk in, turn on the lights and go: “What the fuck are you lot doing?”

The second composer was Philip Jeck, an avuncular-looking figure with white hair, pate shining in the purple light, wearing a blazer. I did enjoy watching this grandfatherly character conjure some extremely dark horror soundtrack on his go. The third was Darkstar – or at least one of them – who played the most “musical” music of the three, which was actually a relief by this point, and gave the string trio some actual playing to do, which was nice. But I was never close to an insight in how the music was responding to the films. 

As for the films, the lack of narrative was challenging. I was struck by how much I craved some – any – narrative. I took to reading the programme by the light of my phone: Oh! He’s travelling across America. Oh! He’s the most famous experimental film-maker of the 20^th century. And these little titbits of narrative did in fact make the experience more compelling. I was left to wonder how much more I would have enjoyed them had I known more about the story of why he had made them, but that did seem as if it might defeat the point of non-narrative cinema.

In fact, I realised, my need of narrative was mostly to justify why I was watching them. If I could tell myself a story about why I was bothering, I’d happily sit there, even if I didn’t “enjoy” the experience. 

It seemed a form over content kind of thing. The films were of the American landscape, but whatever it was they were trying to say – their narrative, for want of a better word – seemed to be carried more by the arrangement of the shots than the shots themselves. There were moments in the films where the rhythm of the cuts and the repetition of shots did come together to offer something like a visual music, but those moments soon passed. Many of the shots were dark, dim or blurred. I was left feeling that if you are going to have no soundtrack and no narrative, the least you could do is have some decent pictures, but that is clearly something else I have to learn about.

A strange one, then. I would have liked to have asked someone who did enjoy it to explain what I was missing, but that’s probably cheating.

* Can you see I’m struggling to explain this bit?

May's poem

Your face to the mace
You may grimace

You’ll be a-maced
following when

Thou mayst read
Of Mace and Men